This Week In Exercise

It was a surprising workout I received from my personal trainer last week, one involving an enormous emphasis on triceps and shoulders, and incorporating balance exercises the likes of which I have never previously attempted. It was tough stuff, but the combination movements and absence of any intra-exercise rest made for an appealling and difficult workout.

As I mentioned last time, these workouts are a bit of an advanced course. The trainers are throwing the book at me and watching what sticks. They laugh about it now. During last week's session, one trainer jokingly called out to mine, "Take it easy on that one..." Both laughed.

But, I am still seeing results, and therefore I am going to continue on and see where it takes me. I will also continue to post my workouts here, in case any of you would like to "follow along."

This Week's Workout:
Three repetitions of the following super-set:

• Double Medicine Ball Push-Ups: Get in push-up position with your toes on a medium-sized medicine ball and one hand on a small-sized medicine ball. Do one push-up; then, roll the medicine ball from one hand to the other. Do twelve such push-ups.
• Variety Push-Ups on Inverted Bosu: Get in push-up position with your feet on the floor and your hands on an upside-down bosu. Bend one leg and hold it underneath your body, with your torso twisted; do five push-ups. Move the leg behind you and raise it up in the air; do five push-ups. Move the leg to the side, perpendicular to your body; do five push-ups. Switch legs and repeat.
• One-Legged Squat-Hold on Inverted Bosu: Hold for 30 seconds in the "down" position of a one-legged squat, with your foot on an inverted bosu. Switch legs and repeat.
• Iron Cross on Inverted Bosu: Holding a pair of hand weights and standing on an upside-down bosu, go into the "down" squat position as you move both arms straight out in front of you. As you go into the "up" position, move both arms straight out to each side. Repeat ten times.
• Clapping Push-Ups: Do ten clapping push-ups. If possible, clap your hands to your shoulders, rather than clapping your hands together.

Once you've been through that super-set three times, do thirty-seconds each of standard box-jumps and box-lunges.

Movie Review (of sorts): The Campaign

The Backdrop
I have been consistently impressed by how prescient The Wall Street Journal has been lately. If not prescient, they have at least been remarkably current on a great deal of issues, moreso than any other newspaper I read. (And, yes, believe it or not, I do read others.) This fact has been demonstrated many times by my repeated links to Journal articles.

On Friday, the release date of the new Will Farrell/Zach Galifinakis movie The Campaign, Peggy Noonan wrote an only-half-good article "A Nation That Believes In Nothing," the punchline of which seems to be some advice for the Mitt Romney presidential campaign. That's the bad half. The good half is at the beginning, where Noonan writes (among other things):

The [Obama campaign's anti-Romney attack] ad's cynicism contributes to a phenomenon that increases each year, and that is that we are becoming a nation that believes nothing. Not in nothing, but nothing we're told by anyone in supposed authority.

I wrote a little bit about this phenomenon the other day, only I put a more positive spin on it. What I said was:

The old style of politics no longer works in today's world. There is too much technology out there. The truth is available to anyone with a smart phone or a home computer. Scientific facts are no longer obscured; people can get them instantaneously. In short, it is far more difficult to pull the wool over the eyes of the public in the year 2012 than it has been in any previous year.

In short, unlike Peggy Noonan, I take it to be a good thing that people no longer swallow any amount of cockamamie garbage cooked-up by their supposed masters. Rather than take the political debate hook, line, and sinker, we are now starting to seek information for ourselves. (Now, I don't see this as some kind of major society-wide mental shift so much as it is a predictable result of increased access to information.)

The Campaign
The new Farrell/Galifinakis movie riffs on these themes, too. From beginning to end, the movie spares no "side" of the political spectrum from criticism. The politicians and their staff are unscrupulous, opportunistic sociopaths. Ordinary people are mindless sheep who believe any message that the politicians cook up. Businessmen are moral bottomless pits that swallow any dollar that wanders their way. Virtually every human being in the movie is a cartoonish, hedonistic version of the life we all live out there, every day.

What I love about this movie - despite its being pretty crass - is the fact that it starts out completely absurd (in the inimitable style of a Will Farrell movie), and proceeds to push the envelope of absurdity to uncharted levels. From the outset of the film, Farrell is a hapless, opportunistic sleaze who uses his political power mostly to score chicks and look good. As the movie progresses, the depth of his sleazery and the extent to which he is willing to debase himself for the sake of winning an election rises to unimaginable heights: He films himself committing adultery with his opponent's wife, he promises the Motch (Koch) Brothers to help them sell a portion of North Carolina to the People's Republic of China. He has no moral compass whatsoever.

Contra Farrell, Galifinakis plays an oddball roped into challenging Farrell's character on the Republican ticket. At first, he "only wants to help," but when he falls under the influence of a new campaign manager, he quickly descends into moral depravity himself, culminating in the disingenuous virtual adoption of Farrell's son and the shooting of Farrell himself.

The level of absurdity employed in the film is so complete that something interesting happens to movie viewers: The suspension of disbelief required to watch any movie persists even through the most absurd scenes. The result is that present-day American politics are completely skewered, the political ruse is totally eviscerated. Walking out of the movie, one really is left with the impression Noonan has: Absolutely nothing the politicians say can possibly be true. Nothing.

Those Left Behind
It would be great, of course, if everyone realized this about politics. It is so completely spun, doctored, invented, and patently false that no one with a real head on their shoulders could ever reasonably believe it. Yet some of them do. Why?

I ventured a guess a few days ago: Faith. Simply stated, people want to believe that politics can be salvaged. Even the end of The Campaign closes with a hopeful note, the notion that if we simply vote for people who tell the truth, our system can be saved from its depravity. (Although, the scenes played during the movie's final credits demonstrate how hopeless that notion actually is - or at least demonstrate that the movie-makers seem to recognize that there is no hope in politicians.)

Simply stated, a great many of us have a terrible and irrational faith in politics. George W. Bush was a terrible president who irreparably damaged the country. Americans then elected a messiah-figure under the belief that he could absolve us of our political sins. The result was a "new boss" equally as depraved and morally bankrupt as his predecessor. One would think that Americans old enough to remember both presidents well would have learned well enough that it requires more than a vote to redeem a nation. Yet, while an increasing number of us turn off the campaign ads, zone out, and abstain from voting, a surprisingly large number of us are still playing the game.

The Veneer Of Truth
Recently, I engaged in a couple of issue-specific debates. When asked to provide some evidence for my position, I cited a scholarly economic analysis with over 200 citations. My opponent cited a left-wing think tank. In the court of public opinion, these two citations have become equivalent. Evidence is evidence, regardless of its academic weight. Numbers are numbers. If I can cite "a study," and someone else can cite "a study," then both positions are supported by "studies," and therefore the whole issue is a matter of opinion.

This is one bad side-effect of the information age I lauded a few days ago. The availability of information has had the result (on a minority of us - those with residual faith in politics) of obliterating the informational ranking mechanisms.

You hear it all the time in common conversation: "One day we hear eggs are bad for us, the next day we hear they're good for us. I just eat whatever I want to!" Or: "There are studies that support anything!" (And a big roll of the eyes ensues.)

It's true that there are numbers out there capable of buttressing any argument. What isn't true, however, is the fact that all information is equal when it comes to supporting a position. There are good numbers and bad, good theories and bad. The major challenge with which mankind will be grappling for the foreseeable future is how to differentiate between the two in light of virtually unlimited access to even the most complex information in the world.

Many of us are already getting there. As evidenced by the current state of politics, however, those with the strongest opinions still have a long way to go.

A Van Halen Retrospective

Van Halen is one of the first bands to which I was exposed as a child. My father was a big fan of their Roth-era radio hits, a communicable condition that easily spread to me. As a child of about 4 or 5, I was very much aware of the band called Van Halen, and what they sounded like. For me, "Panama" and "Jump" were how I identified that band, and this impression stuck with me throughout my early years.

So, you can imagine my surprise when I heard the radically different "Poundcake" on the radio at age 11, and promptly dedicated an entire day to waiting to hear it again on the radio so that I could record it with my tape recorder. I had no idea what band had produced that delightful piece of music, but I was determined to find out. I finally succeeded in getting it on tape, and triumphantly raced over to my sister's room, played it for her with a huge smile on my face and begged her to tell me what band it was. Surprised by my enthusiasm (and clearly not as enthusiastic about the song herself, much to my young chagrin), she somewhat disappointedly told me that it was Van Halen. I couldn't believe it.

But, if there is one lesson to take away from a dozen studio records, a live album, two compilations, and many hours of guitar-driven hard rock and roll, it's that there are essentially three Van Halens - and, no, I'm not referring to the lead singers.

Listening to every album produced by a single artist, start to finish, in sequence always provides a fascinating contextual look at the many parallel musical stories going on in an artist's repertoire. Naturally, Van Halen is no different in this regard. So, let's take a closer look at some of the parallel musical stories going on in these many fantastic albums.

I readily concede that the story of Van Halen has been told and re-told, again and again, in press and by fans, hundreds of times. What's different about this telling of it is that I refuse to get bogged down in comparisons of singers, speculations about members' egos, and bitter laments about my own particular choice of their golden age. No, this time it's about artistic evolution.

By my conception of it, there are a few parallel musical evolutions taking place in Van Halen's music over time, in a few categories. Those categories are: heavy metal, party-band rock, Eddie's voice, and guitar tones.

Heavy Metal. No, Seriously. Heavy Metal.
It seems almost incomprehensible in the year 2012, but the fact of the matter is that there was a point in time when Van Halen was called a heavy metal band. This aspect of the band has made itself an undercurrent of every Van Halen album ever released, although few "real" metal fans would ever identify it as such.

Perhaps Eddie's jazz-and-blues roots and upbringing prevent the heavy aspect from ever really seeming like heavy metal per se. Or, perhaps Alex's comparatively busy and grooving approach to drumming doesn't lend itself to the rhythmically flat and metronomic aspects of a heavy metal rhythm section. Maybe the singers just couldn't pull it off. Whatever the reason, Van Halen has consistently been exploring the heavy metal genre throughout its 35+ year career without ever really delivering what purists would call heavy metal.

While that may disappoint heavy metal purists, to me it's simply another spice that combines to create the Van Halen flavor.

And it is an important flavor, lending the band a hefty solidness that other bands from the 70s never captured, not even the really heavy ones. Lots of bands were doing heavy metal by the time Van Halen broke in 1978: Judas Priest, Rainbow, Nazareth, UFO, Rising Force, The Scorpions... you know, that whole scene. But when you listen to those bands, they sound like the 70s. The guitar tones are thin, the drums sound flimsy, and the overall sense we get from that music is sort of the sonic equivalent of lambchop sideburns, and cheap pornography. It feels dirty, shabby, it's missing something.

Van Halen may never have delivered true metal, but the heavy girth they injected into their tones, production, arrangement, and songwriting elevated them to being something much more than another 70s rock band, and established them as the archetypical eighties rock band. It started on the first album with "On Fire" and "Atomic Punk." Then came "Light Up the Sky" a year later. It's all over the first side of Women and Children First. 

But Van Halen's music isn't about dabbling in genres, it's about a brilliant convergence of musical stories. It's about evolution. The band's metal undercurrent evolved from the crude 70s chugging-E-string of "On Fire" into a collection of songs that would set the standard of guitar playing for decade. Ask any 80s guitarist what album best represents incredible guitar playing, and a good majority of them will cite what is perhaps Van Halen's most sinister album, Fair Warning. That album features the almighty pinnacle of rock guitar playing, the incomparable "Mean Streets," most male fans' absolute favorite song - particularly the guitar players.

Fair Warning was truly groundbreaking among metal albums, and it is perhaps because it was so far ahead of its time that the band waited until 1984 to return to post-apocalyptic lyrics. And it is true that many of the band's guitar-playing fans cite this as the last VH album to feature brilliant guitar work, I couldn't disagree more.

Clearly, I'm building to something here. The heavy metal component of Van Halen's playing is truly what carried it into the Sammy Hagar phase. From the opening notes of 1986's 5150, the listener is forced to understand that Eddie's playing had developed from being an explosion to being an explosion of guitar pyrotechnics that involve far more than just tritone tapping. Sporting some more modern guitar tones and an active-pickup-equipped Steinberger guitar, Eddie hit the Van Hagar years ready to declare a new stage of his musicianship, and the roots of that musicianship were metal, at least in the same sense that "On Fire" is a heavy metal song.

Nor did the world at the time argue about it. In 1986, no one was splitting metal into subgenres or sneering at Van Halen for being an imposter to metal, while a band like, say Iron Maiden represented "true" metal. Listening to the breakdown and guitar solo from "Hot Summer NIghts" makes the case perfectly; it's hard to hear that grinding, guitar-driven fury as being anything other than what it was, eighties metal, driven by an incredible guitar player.

This makes the advent of the Peavey 5150 guitar amplifier all the more logical as a development. Even today, this amplifier (now called the 6505) is one of the most sought-after amplifiers for real metal on the market. It has a deep growl and an unmistakable grind that refuses to get fizzy. It is, furthermore, one of the easiest amps to play I have ever encountered. It simply oozes tone. That such a proud metal machine would appear during the band's Van Hagar years is not at all surprising. It was merely a master guitar player growing into the heavy metal aspect of his playing.

During the "transition periods" of the band, Van Halen consistently deferred to its metal roots. On the first album, it was there in spades. When they took on the Van Hagar years, it came roaring back in contrast to Roth's boogie-crooning. When they took on Gary Cherone, fired him, and released a couple of new tracks with Hagar on the Best of Both Worlds album, there was the metal again. Simply stated, metal is the band's comfort zone, the place to which they return when they feel confused.

A powerful, grinding edge is an important and iconic aspect of what some have called the greatest American rock band in the world. But hundreds of bands feature a masterful grind. If this were the lone defining feature of the band, we'd be talking about Iron Maiden or something. Clearly, there is more to Van Halen than just metal. This brings me to the next aspect of the band.

The Party Band
One of the biggest surprises from my beginning-to-end spin of Van Halen's discography is a song called "Romeo Delight," from the Women and Children First album. While I vaguely recall enjoying this song when I first got the album, its bluesy-metal composition and yelping Roth melodies didn't stick with me as being "classic Van Halen."

That kind of bluesy, hard-rock-yet-somehow-swing kind of songwriting is perhaps the most celebrated aspect of Van Halen the band. Cheery and mischievous, the band churned out hit after hit, classic after classic, featuring a bombastic, swinging rhythm section, the explosive fire of Eddie's lead guitar work, and Roth-penned lyrics and melodies that cannot help but bring a smile to the face.They've been called the greatest party band in the world, and hearing the Roth-era rock/swing fusion makes it easy to see why.

They hit the music scene with this well-honed artistic development already well-defined, with such brilliant songs as "Feel Your Love Tonight," "The Ice Cream Man," "Little Dreamer," and "I'm the One." This latter piece featured the intricate, mature, full-band vocal harmonies and overlap that would set the standard for all major rock bands of the 1980s. Incomprehensibly, the band opted not to release any of these songs as singles. They would go on to correct this omission on Van Halen II with the release of one of my personal favorites, "Beautiful Girls."

While the band's singles may not have been the swing tunes, there is clearly something in these songs that speaks to fans of 80s rock that goes far beyond the guitar solos. The rhythmic arrangements are extremely tight and grooving, the vocal harmonies are spot-on, and something about them just makes a person yearn for the beach, the sunshine, and a cold beer. Somehow, Roth-era Van Halen managed to distill the essence of a man's carefree and scandalous early 20s, with Roth himself cast as the Chief Rascal and primary narrator.

Nor did the band merely pen a few of these classics and move on. "I'm the One" is an unquestionably crude effort when put up against the likes of "Little Guitars" or "Big Bad Bill (Is Sweet William Now)," both from Diver Down. The group was obviously not satisfied to leave their early efforts be, but rather continued developing and refining the sound, venturing into acoustic blues, gypsy swing, and the almost experimental likes of "Hot For Teacher."

"Hot For Teacher," though would be 1984's lone venture into scoundrel swing. It was their last real venture into that territory until they re-hired Roth in later years (first for the Best Of, Vol. 1 album, and later for the A Different Kind of Truth album). The other party-rock songs on that album were dominated with the blossoming harmonic vision of the band's guitarist, which brings me the band's next major parallel artistic plot.

Eddie's Voice
This aspect of the band probably first reared its head on the song "In A Simple Rhyme," from 1980's Women and Children First, although there were clear hints of it in Eddie's guitar solos on the previous two albums. EVH has always had a rather unique sense of harmony, creating cadences that are as much a part of Van Halen as the guitar pyrotechnics and wild antics. Indeed, part of what makes EVH's playing so unique is not his attitude, tone, or technique, but rather his harmonic choices.

So, while his harmonic composition techniques were readily evident in 1978's "Eruption," right there from the very beginning, the band itself didn't really include EVH's delightful cluster chords and piano-like cadences until "In A Simple Rhyme," the last song of their third album. It was, perhaps, a hint of things to come.

We hear it again on Fair Warning, in the flanging intro to "Hear About It Later," and throughout "Push Comes To Shove." That latter piece is arguably one of the most important "flagship" songs of the band's output, clearly demonstrating the best each member of the band has to offer - from Roth's infatuation with big band tunes to the command of dynamics that Alex and Michael Anthony's rhythm section has always had, to the topic of this section, Eddie's brilliant harmonic compositional style, "Push Comes To Shove" has it all.

By the time 1982's Diver Down was released, Van Halen was delivering songs with Eddie's personal harmonic flair with cool confidence, as demonstrated by "Secrets," a companion-piece of sorts to "Push Comes To Shove." From 1984 onward, this would become the iconic aspect of the band's songwriting - at least, in my opinion - perhaps peaking with the super-duper smash hit "Right Now."

While many VH fans cite the departure of David Lee Roth as the main difference between "old" Van Halen and "later" Van Halen, I myself would argue that Eddie's harmonic maturity had reached a point in 1984 that could no longer support the good-time-boys antics of a 70s rock outfit. You can hear it loud and clear in the chordal riffs of "Best of Both Worlds." These are more than pentatonic riffs and power chords. There is real intelligence here.

Maybe this personal musical growth that EVH was undergoing is what pushed the band into greater keyboard/synthesizer territory. Certainly, many interviews with the maestro himself give that impression, but Eddie is all business when he's giving an interview - as he is when on stage. So it's hard to get the real, unabridged story reading the interviews.

In this case, though, I feel the interviews do tell the real story. Listening to the keyboard voicings, you can hear the same sort of movement going on with the synthesizers that you hear in the guitar work. With each album, it commanded more attention, and with a growing self-confidence to boot. By the time For Unlawful Carnal Knowledge dropped, it was starting to impact even the guitarist's most straightforward riffs. First we got a hint of it in the song "Black and Blue" one album prior. But compare that relatively lighter influence to the song "Spanked." What could be simpler and more straight-forward than the riffs in "Spanked?" And yet, harmonic development is not quite as standard as we might initially expect. There, the trademark EVH harmonic voicing screams forth in all its glory.

This developing harmonic voice would naturally come with two musical co-conspirators: a blossoming palette of more mature guitar tones (more on those in a moment), and a progressively more complex song structure. This perhaps became most obvious with "Cabo Wabo," but by 1988's "In 'N Out," it was in-your-face. Just compare a riff like the one in "Unchained" to the riff in "The Seventh Seal." Night and day, right? The backbone was still that bluesy party rock that gave the band so much commercial appeal, but it was being pushed in so many new and utterly progressive directions. It was no longer merely lengthy guitar solos that pushed Van Halen songs into 7-minute territory and beyond. There were adventurous intros, heavily orchestrated outros, full-band jam bridges, sweet-and-quiet breakdowns, and - yes, of course - lengthy guitar solos. Few mainstream acts have been able to push themselves into territory that complex while still keeping a thumb on the pulse of the arena-rock crowd. Van Halen managed to do this in spades.

All About Tones
Another parallel story told in Van Halen's discography is the evolution of Eddie's guitar tone. From the first album, we hear that gorgeous, can't-miss-it EVH tone. It's chock-full of power tube compression, lending a soft, squishy edge to his clear, crisp overdrive. It's stuffed with treble, but somehow manages to sit comfortably in the sonic midrange. It's deep and manly with not even a trace of mud. It's pure and conventional, but yet spaced-out with deep phasing and flanging.

And yet that incomparable guitar tone also hasn't stagnated during Van Halen's career, either. The Roth years gave EVH a chance to develop his guitar tone progressively. It didn't so much change as it did mature. Whether this maturation represents Eddie's developing ear, or the engineering refinement of Ted Templeman is anyone's guess. Whatever it was, by the time the band released Diver Down, the "classic Eddie" brown sound had become as much a part of the band as the man playing the instrument. It sparkled with clarity and crackled with heat. EVH could hit any note and it would ring out with a shimmering gorgeousness that no other player has ever managed to capture.

To my ears, this early Van Halen tonal journey peaked with the 1984 album. For fans of melodic hard rock and lead guitar, one would be hard-pressed to identify an album showcasing better guitar tone. All of the EVH hallmarks are there - the power tube overdrive, the clear and focused pickup tone, the shimmering high end that somehow refuses to fizzle, the phase and the flange. Clearly, this was a tonal recipe honed to perfection and prepared to serve as the tonal standard for the next two generations of guitarists.

Then, incredibly, it changed. It had to change, though. By 1986, the band had been releasing albums for nearly a decade, they had fired their iconic lead singer, and they needed to stay relevant.

I am no encyclopedia of guitar gear and classic albums, but to my ears, 5150 opens with a Soldano's snarl. Gone was the Phase 90, gone was the flanger, and gone was the drenching plate reverb. Instead, Eddie chose a deeper tone, further down in the midrange, tastefully articulated through an analog chorus of some kind. It was still Eddie, of course, but modernized, and the effect was brilliant. Here was a whole new "big guitar sound" for fans of the instrument to wrap their ears around.

As I noted above, the advent of the 5150 amplifier would soon follow, lending Eddie a deep new grind with which to define his tones. Ever the tinkerer, though, the post-1986 albums would feature a new trademark of the EVH tone: thick layers of clean-toned and direct-to-the-console clean guitar tones. In interviews, he would reveal that this effect was accomplished using a complicated six-amplifier recording process. Like Frank Zappa, Edward Van Halen was recording the same guitar tracks dirty, clean, and direct, and mixing them as he saw fit.

While many Van Halen aficionados prefer the simpler and perhaps more honest tones of the early days, there can be no argument that Eddie's tone was growing bigger and more refined. Listening back through the catalog, I wonder how much chorus effect is actually being used, versus how much natural chorusing is coming through from the multiple-amp/multiple-mic recording process. Whatever the truth, the result is a tone as large and fabulous as the band itself.

Conclusion
Whatever your view of the band's antics and drama over the years, Van Halen persists as one of the most iconic American musical groups in history. Their hedonism, joy, virtuosity, bombasticness, and artistic depth are emblematic of everything good in American culture. Sure, there may have been a few missteps along the way - maybe even a lot of missteps. The fact remains, there is enough in their catalogue of music to keep a person curious and entertained for years. Indeed, this post took me several weeks to write, simply because I was so busy listening carefully to each one of the band's albums, digesting every note and every aspect of the band's evolution. I will always love this band.

For Once, They Get It Right!

In a delightful example of intellectual honesty, Kevin Craft of The Atlantic explains that the level of physical fitness present at the Olympic Games is well beyond the intellectual comprehension of most of the spectators:

This may seem like a somewhat obvious idea—Usain Bolt is more athletic than you!—but it's worth considering. The difference in athletic abilities between sports fans and the athletes they watch is so great that, even if given the chance, the average person could not meaningfully exist on a playing field with elite competitors. If you inserted the average Joe or Jane onto a basketball court or football field with a group of professionals, that person's presence would not even register. If you put an average person in an Olympic speed race like the 100-meter dash—an event where the top performers run at speeds that exceed 26 miles per hour—that person would appear to be running through quicksand. The level of play in professional and Olympic sports is so high that it practically constitutes an entirely different reality from the amateur level, and that has repercussions for our understanding of sports and our feelings towards athletes.

Well put, and I completely agree. Especially when it comes to events that are a question of pure physicality (as opposed to technique), the level of athleticism involved here is so tremendous, so great, that no "normal" human being can meaningfully understand its significance - even if they think they can!

Craft doesn't stop there. He challenges his readers to go home tonight and try to learn what it means to be an Olympic marathon runner:

So when the Olympic marathon rolls around on Saturday morning, grab your tennis shoes, hop on a treadmill, and program it to run at a six-minute-mile pace. That's the easy part. The tricky part will be to see how long you can keep it up. If you're like me, you'll be reprogramming the speed dial at some point before you complete your first mile, and after you've completed three miles, you will opt to watch the rest of the race from the comfort of your couch. Whenever I try to sustain Olympic Marathon type of speed, my lungs start to burn, my legs turn to rubber, and my complexion begins to resemble the colors found on most Valentine's Day cards. I cannot, and probably never will be able to, fathom how a human being can run at that speed for over two and a half hours—though it pleases me to know I could match strides with the world's best distance runners for about four minutes. My best recorded mile time is six minutes and four seconds. Mr. Sato of Japan completed 26.2 miles at around that speed. Even though he finished last at the 2008 Olympics, he is still a superhuman athlete in my mind.

Running is the most elemental sport we have. Its premise is so simple: Run a certain distance in less time than everyone else. And people of all ages can relate to it. Children stage races in schoolyards and cul-de-sacs to determine who is the fastest kid on the block; adults run and jog to stay in shape. Olympic running gives us a sense of who the fastest person of all the blocks around the world is. While the vast majority of us will never be able to experience the speeds achieved by top sprinters, we can run, for at least a short amount time, at the same speed as Olympic marathoners. And when our bodies begin to falter after one mile or five or 10, the truly difficult nature of this sport will mean more to us than ever before. 

 Here-here, Mr. Craft.

Inspiration Or Accident?

The actions and words of other people are influenced by many factors of which you are not aware. 

At any given moment in time, someone is experiencing their own, private, meaningful set of thoughts. Unless you make a habit of forcing people to tell you what they've been going through lately, you have no idea.

More importantly, unless you make a habit of keeping up with other people's private baggage on a minute-by-minute basis, you are lacking important context in which to consider the things someone might be telling you.

Negative And Positive Responses All Have Context
Obvious examples tell this story best. We have all been in situations when we went to someone we know to talk about something and received a surprising and unpleasant response that seemed to "come out of nowhere." In some cases, after some conversation, we are able to learn that the person has been having a bad day, or has been dealing with a tough situation lately, or has been experiencing some other such pressure. Once we know this, it is easy to set the initial unpleasantry aside, considering the person was under the undue influence of life's many bothers.

It is not so obvious, however, that a great many of the pleasant things that people say to us are also the result of their own private thoughts. In some cases, a person in a good mood chooses to brighten the day of others. That's great. In other cases, a person chooses to say nice things to other people as a result of something bad that they are thinking. It can work both ways. 

Sometimes a person can share a wealth of thoughts and emotions - an entire catalogue of things that prove deeply influential on you - not because they are strong, intelligent, and perceptive, but because they are going through difficult things in life. Their thoughts seem remarkably poignant, but are in fact defensive mechanisms designed to protect them from the demons they are tackling internally.

The Nature Of Invention
This is a stunning and powerful fact. That many of the things that amaze and inspire us might be nothing more than the defensive byproducts of a person's inner turmoil is potentially disheartening. We want to believe that truth is truth, and anyone speaking truth must be a brilliant sage.

The reality of life, though, is that everyone says incredibly wise and incredibly stupid things all the time, based largely on what's going on in their heads. That someone mistakenly says something brilliant does not diminish the fact that what they said was brilliant  Rather, it simply means that they stumbled upon something profound and important while doing other things.

It is the nature of invention. A person who knows little can teach you much. A person who tells you something that allows you to gain better control of your own life may slip out of control when it comes to their own. Discovery, as Edgar Allen Poe implied, is often little more than an accident. It can seem disappointing to a romantic, but it is nonetheless an important fact.

Reasons For Optimism

Judge Andrew Napolitano published a Fox News editorial today describing the extent to which the US government has been spying on US citizens. It is a good, short read that offers more opinion than news. There are no big revelations there, mostly just an eloquent defense of essential liberty.

He concludes:

The answer to these questions goes to the nature of human freedom and personal courage. Freedom lies in our hearts, but to survive, it must do more than just lie there. Its essence is the exercise of unfettered choices, and the unfettered choices we make address our perpetual yearning for truth. This is a natural process that -- just like the muscles in our bodies -- will atrophy if unused.

So, when the government scares us into the disuse of freedom, we have only ourselves to blame when Big Brother comes calling. And when he does come, on his face there will be no smile.

This is merely the most recent in a long (seemingly unending) series of news items providing an epitaph to American freedom. Drones, preemptive attacks, spying, groping, tazing, torture and abuse of the police power have become the new normal. We hardly even balk at it anymore.

It is a serious problem that is in great need of being corrected immediately. It is enough to lose sleep over, and more than enough to be devastating to those of us who love liberty.

Unlike many, however, I am optimistic about the future. I would like to explain why I am.

If you have been following the news coverage of the 2012 US Presidential Campaign, you notice that this year, more than any other year that any of us can remember, things seem almost surreal. Obama blames Romney for a woman's death and promotes the idea that Romney is going to raise taxes. That's right, the Democrat accuses the Republican of raising taxes. And the Republican? The defender of low taxes and limited government instituted socialized health care in the State of Massachusetts when he was governor.

You can't make this stuff up. The claims made by both sides are so bafflingly confused that it is apparent to everyone - including you, the reader - that game is up. We all see through it now. The confused campaign messages prove it.

The old style of politics no longer works in today's world. There is too much technology out there. The truth is available to anyone with a smart phone or a home computer. Scientific facts are no longer obscured; people can get them instantaneously. In short, it is far more difficult to pull the wool over the eyes of the public in the year 2012 than it has been in any previous year.

In 2003, we were fooled into believing that Iraq "might" have had WMDs. In 2012, we can look at satellite images ourselves in a matter of seconds. In 1994, HillaryCare couldn't be debated because most people didn't understand government economic analysis. In 2012, the raw data is available to anyone with spreadsheet software (which is free).

Information is so readily available that would-be dictators and oppressors can no longer rely on public ignorance to perpetrate their evils.

In many ways, we live in a much less free society than our grandparents did. Government forces can and do conspire to kill their own citizens (see: Syria) when the threat of uprising is a real one. But the legitimacy of politics is thoroughly bankrupt. The world now knows too much.

It was once possible to fool all of the people some of the time. Today, it is impossible to fool all of the people, ever. The truth is just too prevalent.

That is why I am optimistic about the future of liberty.

Some Links

Birds made up just 12 per cent of all animals killed, possibly because their ability to fly helped to keep them out of harm's way, the biologist told a meeting of the Ecological Society of America.

-- What would we do without biologists?

The remarkable feature of China is that despite the private sector's disadvantages in credit markets, it has advanced and outgrown the privileged state sector. Perhaps, one day, we will see what it can accomplish on a level playing field.

 -- From Paul Gregory, via a hat tip to David Henderson

After adjusting for demographics, blood pressure, waist circumference, smoking status and lipid levels, the researchers found that normal weight individuals were twice as likely to die from diabetes than overweight/obese people. They also found that older adults and non-white participants were more likely to develop normal-weight Type 2 diabetes.

-- ...but I wonder what role misdiagnosis played? Late-onset Type 1 diabetics are often misdiagnosed as being Type 2.

On Being A Good Person

Here's a question I'd like you to consider: What determines whether or not someone is a good person?

Consider the possible determining factors:

• Does the person know right from wrong?
• Does the person adhere to a code of ethics?
• Does the person do nice things?
• Is the person friendly?
• Does the person put others' interests ahead of his/her own?
• Does the person respect social institutions?
• Does the person give others the benefit of the doubt?
• ...and so on.

An interesting aspect of this list (and, presumably, any such list of factors) is that no one factor or combination of factors seems to determine whether someone is a good person. This is an idea worth exploring.

Ethics Aren't Sufficient
Having a code of ethics - and indeed adhering to one's ethical code - does not appear to be sufficient to make someone a good person.

One can easily point to "big-ticket" examples here, in which people hate each other for religious or political reasons. But we need not necessarily go there. There seems to be more to it than that. We all know people who rigorously adhere to a particular value system, despite the fact that they don't particularly seem to be good people. Perhaps for some of us, our ethical code even makes us a more rigidly acidic person than we otherwise would be.

Of course, the obsessively logical among us could counter that there is a flaw in such a person's ethical code: they have neglected tact, or gentleness, or forgiveness, or kindness in some way. This flaw, or logical friends would say, explains why the ethical person is not a particularly good person.

But I don't necessarily buy that. For one thing, the "missing piece" might be genuinely unwelcome in the person's ethical system, for legitimate and logical reasons. For another thing, simply having an ethical system does not automatically make a person perfect. Joe Ethics might truly endeavor to adhere to his philosophy, and might truly fail in his attempts.

No, I think it takes more than ethics to be a good person.

On The Other Hand, Just Doing Nice Things Is Also Not Enough
In contrast, I know many people who reject rigid ethical systems and instead approach being a good person from a more lax perspective. They might not be able to come up with concrete, logical rules about right and wrong, but they claim to know it when they see it.

One problem with this view is that such people often do things that are completely contradictory. They may feel that sparing the rod is good for the child, only to spoil their children so much that the children themselves grow up maladjusted to modern life. They might be so concerned with not hurting a friend's feelings that they may neglect to provide much-needed honest feedback when required.

Another problem with this view is that it almost always spares the holder of that view a lot of responsibility that they should rightly bear. Just as someone who proclaims they will "work out really hard" without defining what "hard" means will often underestimate their true potential, so too will lackadaisical "good people" often do only the minimum. Perhaps they feel that smiling and being friendly is good enough.

So, What Is Enough?
It appears there is some discretion involved here. A good person is someone who has a good sense of ethics, but who doesn't let concrete positions interfere with discretionary, personal interaction. A good person is one who does nice things, but does them in a consistent enough manner to avoid causing undue injury to others when they require something more firm than a kind word.

There's more. A good person is friendly to everyone, but not so friendly as to treat well someone who has grieveously injured a close friend; i.e., a good person doesn't let friendliness interefere with their sense of loyalty. A good person is altruistic, but not to the point that he/she compromises the interests of those close to him/her, including himself/herself. A good person gives credit to others, but not undue credit.

When you boil it all down, being a good person appears to mean being of value to those with whom one has close relationships. That is, being a good person means being considered good by those whose relationships the good person values.

I spend a lot of time on this blog discussing ethics, creeds, and such. I wanted to inject a little sanity into the discussion, as well. It's not all about adhering to rules, it's about applying discretion when merited. It's about enriching those lives we feel deserve to be enriched. It's about cultivating strong, positive relationships. It's about making a tough judgment call.

This Week In Exercise

Last week my personal trainer introduced me to an absolutely brutal workout. I did it with my trainer on Thursday, and a second time on Sunday. I will do it a third time on Tuesday, and will be ready for my next brutal workout on Thursday again.

I'll start by describing the workout, and then I'll offer some general impressions and recommendations on the workout specifically. Finally, I'll add a few thoughts about my experience with personal training thus far.

The Workout
This killer workout begins with a monster plyometric superset as follows:

• Push-Up with row to burpee and punch: Start in push-up position, with your hands on a set of hand weights. Do one push up, then row the weight in your right hand from push-up position. Do another push-up, row the weight in your left hand. Do a third push up, then burpee up to standing position and do a right-punch, left-punch, right-punch, left-punch (still holding the weights). That's one. Do eight of those.
• Roller Fly: Start in push-up position with your hands on a set of hand weights. Roll the weights out as far as you can, then roll them back in together. That's one. Do eight of those.
• Iso-Lunge Combination: Holding hand weights, do three jumping lunges on the same leg. During the third, lift the weights to a full curl position and do three more jumping lunges on the same leg. During the third (now the sixth total), lift the weights straight up over your head and do three more jumping lunges. Switch and do the same set of nine jumping lunges on the other leg, too. That's one. Do eight of those.
• Iso-Push-Up with burpee to uppercut: Start in push-up position, with your hands on a set of hand weights. Do one push-up. At the apex, jump your hands up off the ground (holding the weights) and twist your hands so that the handles of the weights go from being parallel to being inline. Do another push-up. Then burpee up to standing position and do a right-uppercut, left-uppercut, right-uppercut, left-uppercut. That's one. Do eight of those.

All of the above is to be done three times. When finished, the workout closes with one repetition of the following:

• Incline Push-Up Fly: Start in incline push-up position, with your feet on a bench and one hand holding a hand weight. Using the hand with the weight, do eight reverse flys from that position. Then, switch hands and do eight flys with the other arm.
• Squat Jump-and-Tuck: Holding a pair of hand weights, do 10 jump-and-tucks from squat position.

By the end, you may have already passed out. If not, hit the cardio machines for as long as you can go.

Succeeding At This Workout
Although this workout seems like it is actually less work than what I was doing a week earlier, it takes all I can do to finish it. My muscles literally give out by the end, which is of course what one wants to have happen when one is doing strength training.

Notice that I have not included any description of resting between sets. This is because, when I worked out with my trainer, I wasn't allowed to rest between sets. When I did it by myself, though, I couldn't help but take a little rest in between. The best thing I can say about rest during this workout is, minimize it. You will get the most out of this workout if you do not rest at all. Keep in mind that the whole thing should only take you about 20-30 minutes to complete. If you can hunker down and work hard for just twenty minutes, then you'll have mastered the workout.

Notice also that there are no explicit abdominal exercises involved here. One might get the impression that it's a workout that is light on the abs, however that is not the case. Because most of the exercises involve push-up position, one's back starts to sag if the abdominal muscles aren't tightly flexed throughout the duration of the workout. In fact, if you don't keep your abdominal muscles flexed when you do this, you may find that your lower back aches once you're done. It is a surprisingly difficult workout on the abs and back.

Finally, you may not be able to do all of the exercises perfectly when you give this a try. Just do the best you can. Keep going until your muscles give out, then try again. The harder you push yourself, the better this workout will pay off.

Three Weeks of Personal Training - Some Impressions
Now that I am on my third week of personal training, I feel I can provide some general impressions about the experience thus far.

For one thing, it is somewhat comical to see that these trainers are basically throwing the book at me. They are used to training relative novices who need constant encouragement and direction to make a positive change in their lives. That is certainly a valid reason to seek personal training, but it is not the only reason. When I show up, the trainers ask me, "You look pretty fit; what are you here for?" The answer I give them is that my body has been in a bit of a rut, and I'm looking to get out of it and supplement my regular running workouts with some physical training.

The result is that they are giving me workouts that go well above and beyond what most people get to do. This is both fun and humorous. Last week, my trainer said to me, "It's not often I get to work with fit people. I had to bring out some different stuff; you saw some creativity today!" Twice during the workout, the trainer told me that he was asking me to do something that none of his other clients could do.

The results also speak for themselves. Others have noticed the visible changes in my physical appearance. My shoulders are broader, and the muscle tone in my arms is at a point at which it has never been. This is very encouraging. I also find that my running is not suffering from the added muscle. One possible reason for this is that my weight hasn't really gone up, despite the obvious increase in muscle mass. This means that I am shedding even more fat (which I didn't really know I had).

By the end of each workout, I am struck by two seemingly incompatible feelings: The first is a total, all-encompassing fatigue from being pushed about as far as I can go; the second is a powerful feeling of being able to accomplish anything.

This latter feeling is something I never expected when I signed up for personal training sessions. Truth be told, I haven't felt that good about a workout in years, maybe even decades. It is remarkable.

For these reasons, I highly recommend personal training to anyone with the disposable income to support it. It is well worth the investment. Not only will it take your body into new territory, it will generate a self-confidence you never knew you had. And it's not the trainer's encouragement that will give it to you, either. Instead, it is the confidence that can only be earned by asking your body to do something you don't think it can do, and watch it rise to the occasion.

A Song A Day

I am incredibly reluctant to write this post. I am worried that I will not be able to live up to the endeavor I am about to describe.

However, my journey through the world of self-improvement is a journey involving a lot of substantial challenges. A challenge that can be easily accomplished is not much of a challenge; rather, it's more like a task. A challenge is by definition something that a person is not sure whether he can complete. It is, in a word, challenging. If it weren't, it wouldn't be a challenge. (Duh.)

Before I tell you about my challenge, the nature of which you have probably guessed already in reading the title of this post, I would like to say a few words about fearlessness and challenge.

Many people are so reluctant to fail that they never truly challenge themselves. The only "challenges" they're willing to take on are things that they definitely, positively, certainly know they will do. This sentiment strikes me as being an artifact of the softness of modern society. We announce easily attainable goals to the world, reach them, and then bask in appreciation from our family and friends.

I don't mean to come down harshly on people here, but in my opinion it's important not to devalue achievement. One could easily "challenge oneself to eat an entire bowl of oatmeal for breakfast," but that is obviously not much of a challenge, and it would be worrisome if that person's peers lauded his/her accomplishment. Hurrah! You ate the entire bowl of oatmeal! Kudos!

Part of the reason running a marathon is a real challenge is that even experienced marathoners don't know for certain whether they will finish the race when the starter pistol fires. It is not until 75% of the race is over that a runner starts to gain some perspective into whether he or she will reach the finish line.

That's a challenge.

What this implies is that, if you set a lot of true challenges for yourself, you will probably not accomplish all of them. If you do it right, you will probably only accomplish about 50% of what you ask of yourself.

A 50% success rate doesn't seem very "encouraging," but this is the nature of trying to push oneself to greater heights. You will often fail. On the other hand, you will find yourself rising to a lot of substantial challenges, and that's a good thing.

I am not afraid of failure, because I like to challenge myself. If you challenge yourself, you should not be surprised if you fail. You should never be ashamed of it. If you really did ask yourself to do something beyond your current capability, then a success is a real success. A "failure" isn't really a failure, per se, just something you didn't have it within you to accomplish. You can always try again.

So let's not devalue achievement by maintaining low standards and melodramatic levels of encouragement. Instead, let's value achievement by routinely asking ourselves to do difficult things, being happy when we do them, and being unafraid and unashamed of failure.

My Challenge
I find myself in a situation where I am being asked to learn a large amount of musical material in a very short period of time. To accomplish this, I aim to cut things up into manageable chunks. As Benjamin Franklin write, "Little strokes fell big oaks."

For the next little while, I intend to learn a new song every day. Along the way, I would like to blog about the song and what I've learned from it, discussing the finer points, what I like and dislike, and so forth.

This is a challenge not because learning songs is difficult, but rather learning them consistently one-per-day and blogging about them will take dedication and concentration. It will take a level of commitment above and beyond what I have dedicated to both the blog and to learning music in the past. I hope I can do it.

But I might not be able to. You've been warned....

Sorry, Gretchen. Exercise Matters.

I have previously claimed that exercise is just as important as diet when it comes to health and fitness. (See a brief previous post here.)

Today's online New York Times has an article by one Gretchen Reynolds that reiterates what has become a recurring them at the Times and elsewhere, with respect to health and fitness. I quote (with omissions omitted and emphasis added):

[I]n a just world, frequent physical activity should make us slim. But repeated studies have shown that many people who begin an exercise program lose little or no weight. Some gain.

...

The implication, the scientists concluded, is that “active, ‘traditional’ lifestyles may not protect against obesity if diets change to promote increased caloric consumption.” That is, even active people will pack on pounds if they eat like most of us in the West.

The underlying and rather disheartening message of that finding, of course, is that physical activity by itself is not going to make and keep you thin.

I am not particularly sure why this idea has taken root in the psyche of the pop-fitness world, but it is somewhat disconcerting. Over and over again, we hear that it is diet that determines whether or not we lose weight or remain thin. "Diet is more important than exercise," they tell us. "Diet is more significant than exercise," studies conclude.

The problem with this story is that, if we were to believe it, we would conclude that a healthy diet, along with some genetic factors, is what makes an elite athlete Olympic-caliber, while the rest of us are relegated to weekend-warrior status, or worse: obese. Told that way, the idea that you can "eat your way to the Olympics" is almost laughable. But is it true?

In an almost eerie coincidence, today's Wall Street Journal published an article about the extent to which Olympic athletes gorge themselves on junk food. That article opens with the following stunner: "U.S. swimmer Ryan Lochte ate McDonald's food for nearly every meal at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing and won four medals, including gold in the 200-meter backstroke."

The Journal article continues:

Among the oddities that distinguish Olympic athletes is their ability to massively consume the very foods everyone else is nagged to avoid.

The Olympic workouts of elite swimmers burn up thousands of calories and trigger training table menus that sound like the wish list for a kid's birthday party: Big Macs, Mountain Dew, Skittles, chocolate milk.

In contrast, here's Reynolds again, over at the Times:

“There’s this expectation that if you exercise, your metabolism won’t drop as you lose weight or will even speed up,” says Diana Thomas, a professor of mathematics at Montclair State University in New Jersey, who led the study.

But she says close mathematical scrutiny of past studies of exercise and weight loss shows that that happy prospect is, sad to say, unfounded. One of the few studies ever to have scrupulously monitored exercise, food intake and metabolic rates found that volunteers’ basal metabolic rates dropped as they lost weight, even though they exercised every day. As a result, although they were burning up to 500 calories during an exercise session, their total daily caloric burn was lower than it would have been had their metabolism remained unchanged, and they lost less weight than had been expected.

So, on the one hand we have Reynolds over at the Times telling us that the speed of a person's metabolism plays little to no role in health and fitness, that it all comes down to diet. On the other hand, we have Rachel Bachman over at the Journal telling us that Olympic athletes are able to burn through so many calories that the foods they consume end up being so unhealthy and calorie-dense that it is almost shocking.

One of these things must be true, and the other false. But which?

Getting To The Truth
Unless Bachman completely fabricated her story, the quotes she supplies from real Olympic athletes, in which they readily own up to their junk food diets suggests that it is possible to eat large amounts of a "Western diet" and be not only healthy, but world class. From my own experience, I can tell you that I never ate as much junk food as I did when I was competing in NCAA track and field. That this happens prevalently is an inarguable fact.

This flies in the face of Reynolds' assertion that "even active people will pack on pounds if they eat like most of us in the West." Olympic athletes, in point of fact, can retain their positions as the best athletes in the entire world while consuming diets that are far worse than what "most of us in the West" eat.

What Gives?
The answer to this apparent conundrum boils down to what you think makes a person an Olympic-caliber athlete.

To many of us, being an Olympic athlete means you were somehow blessed with superior genetics, that you contain a level of physical ability not possessed by "mere mortals." No "normal person" can ever hope to get to the Olympics, according to this logic, because the major determining factors are solely genetic. This genetic superiority further allows the godly Olympic competitors to consume whole large-sized pizzas without ever gaining a pound, while the rest of us would be sent to the hospital were we to attempt such a feast.

What role does training play in the development of an elite athlete? If diet is so much more significant a factor, why don't athletes spend more time tweaking their diets and less time training?

As those of us who have seriously competed in athletic events well know, training plays a big role in the development of an elite athlete. It takes years - decades - for a human being to reach a world-class level of athletic performance. Clearly, all that training and practicing has an impact; it doesn't all just come down to having good genes.

It's Not How You Exercise For The Next 3 Months - It's How You Exercise Forever
Earlier this year, researchers in Stockholm, Sweden observed that a 20-minute bout of exercise was sufficient to activate dorman genes for up to 48 hours, stimulating fat metabolism. (References are many, but try this Time Magazine article, for example.) They further discovered that the more intense the exercise, the greater was the "activation" of these genes.

That's one recent article. Here's an article from 2003, describing how aerobic exercise increased the "activity of muscle mitochondrial enzymes... and mRNA levels of mitochondrial genes... and genes involved in mitochondrial biogenesis...."

The truth of the matter is that one's genes are not a static thing. They change in response to exercise. And the more you build on your exercise regimen, the more your genes change.

You can't lift 15 pounds until you're capable of lifting 10. You can't lift 10 pounds until you're capable of lifting 5. If today you're not capable of lifting any amount of weight, you cannot get to the point where you can do a full gym-based weight routine until you first build your muscles to a certain point. Once there, you can build on your progress. The point here is that exercise isn't binary. It's not "either you exercise, or your don't." Instead, it's a question of how much you're exercising, what you're doing, how hard you push yourself. (Take, for example, this 2009 study showing that exercise intensity is significant when it comes to the health benefits of the exercise being performed.)

That's how it works for Olympic athletes, too. They start as young children, playing and competing in recreation-league sports, just like you did. We all started out with minimal ability, no technique, and merely a casual interest in the sport. Over time, we developed our abilities and tried to better them even further. But, where you reached a point where you were relatively satisfied with your performance level, elite athletes, pushed themselves further still. They kept training while the rest of us went to watch a movie. They had a keener interest and a greater dedication. Their physical abilities are a direct result of that dedication, and the resulting training it entailed.

Studies that examine the comparative roles of diet and exercise on cohorts of people always follow a group of people for between one month and two years. A lot can happen in such a period of time, but one thing we know for sure is that it takes many years of training for an elite athlete to become an Olympian.

Could it be that our friends at the time, such as Gretchen Reynolds, suffer from an insufficiently lengthy cognitive time-horizon?

The Bottom Line
Reynold's isn't a dolt, and I won't disagree with her on every point. If you have some weight to lose, you owe it to yourself to clean up your diet and take on an exercise regimen. If you have a lot of weight to lose, then you probably have significant changes to make to your diet, and those changes will have a more significant impact on your body than the daily walk you might decide to take.

However, the reason Olympic athletes can consume so much junk food without suffering negative repercussions is because they have been training very hard for a very long time. No change that you make to your diet will ever have as significant an impact on your overall health level as a decades-long dedication to physically demanding exercise will.

So, you can take the Times' advice and improve the quality of your diet for a quick bang if you're looking to lose a few pounds. But if you think you're going to become a healthy person just by eating a good diet, you're fooling yourself. Real health comes from good, hard exercise.

Just as Olympic athletes don't make it to the Games without years of hard training, you'll never reach a real and appreciable level of overall health unless you push yourself hard with intense exercise for years on end. We all want a silver bullet, but there just isn't one. If you want to be healthy, you have to do healthy things.

Cochrane on the Economy

Somehow or another, John H. Cochrane's excellent economics blog continually goes overlooked in the economics blogosphere. He consistently writes analysis of a quality and seriousness found on few other blogs; yet, the "heavy hitters" seem to prefer nitpicking posts by Matt Yglesias and Ryan Avent. Even non-economist Ezra Klein seemingly gets more real estate in the economics world than Cochrane.

Personally, I find this flabbergasting.

Take this morning's round of posts, for example. Every morning, I ritualistically read my shortlist of economics blogs (which is actually not so short) like other people read the newspaper. I like to know what's going on out there, what's being discussed. Tyler Cowen and Scott Sumner were discussing articles at The Financial Times. Kurt Schuler and Jonathan Finegold Catalan were still discussing Milton Friedman. The always-excellent David Henderson was discussing an old issue of Reason magazine.

Great posts, all of them. But flying right under the radar was John H. Cochrane's excellent analysis of the US macroeconomy. Here is a post so current, so well-written, so easy-to-understand that it ought have been published as an op-ed in a major national newspaper (as many of Cochrane's previous analyses have been). He lays out the numbers, provides some analysis, takes a stand, builds a consensus, and leaves the details to be hashed-out by additional commentary. 

...And yet, the economics blogosphere is silent.

When people discuss the various failures of the field of economics in light of the current state of the economy, they usually indict "failures to predict" or "failures to correctly prescribe." I think complete silence in light of a thought-provoking macroeconomic analysis is also worth indicting. But who am I, anyway? Just a Schmo who reads the papers.

Here's Cochrane's conclusion:

The trends are an economists' horror movie. Real GDP seems not to be recovering at all -- no period of swift growth to go back to a trend. We seem stuck at 2.4% growth forever. The CBO is giving up on us too. Employment will not recover as a fraction of population until the economy recovers. We seem stuck at low employment forever. And now we seem headed to a 1970s productivity slowdown as well.

I don't view this as contentious, outside of Presidential politics. Paul Krugman thinks the economy is pretty awful too.

What to do? If only it were so simple as to have the Fed print up another two trillion dollars, or have the Treasury borrow another $5 trillion and blow it on stimulus boondoggles. We're stuck in sclerotic growth, and to everyone but a few die-hard extremists, that means growth-oriented policies are the only way out.

Like me, Cochrane believes in making the regulatory regime better for businesses, so that they can get back to being productive, and he also believes in a low-tax regime that markets and individuals really seem to enjoy. Also like me, he favors limited government spending.

He is closer to being a classic monetarist than I am... Or is he? I'm an economist in transition right now. I'm not sure where my views will ultimately end up. I have been a fan of Austrian economics for a while, but that sub-field is mired in a stagnation of ideas, so I have been trying to expand my horizons a bit. I wait to see where that eventually leads me...

Diabetes and Exercise Part III: After the Workout

Oops, I lied.

In my last article on Diabetes and Exercise, I promised that this article, Part III, would contain some tips on insulin dosing in light of special considerations for diabetics. However, when I sat down to write about those special considerations, I realized that I had left out an important aspect of exercise physiology: what happens after you exercise?

Understanding this question is vital to understanding how the diabetic's body reacts to exercise. The more intense the exercise, the more disruptive this reaction can be. So today, I'd like to provide some (very) basic information about the post-exercise phase of physiology. Just as in Part II, I'm going to keep this as simplified as possible, so that we can focus on the important information and not get caught up in a description of cellular respiration and biochemistry.

After The Workout: Anaerobic Exercise
Recall that in Part II, we learned that anaerobic energy is "ready-to-use" energy stored within the cells, waiting for the moment you move a muscle. It requires no insulin for immediate use, it simply fuels cell work and expires.

Think carefully about what this might imply about the body's next course of action. The stored energy that was once contained in the cells is now gone. The body will naturally act to replenish this energy. This act of replenishment does, in fact require insulin (and other hormones).

When you digest a meal, insulin helps carry glucose into the cells so that it can be converted into this stored energy. When you exercise, this stored energy is depleted and your body becomes "hungry" again. Whenever your body is hungry, it "feeds its cells" with whatever glucose is on-hand.

Therefore, immediately following a big burst of anaerobic exercise, the body starts drawing on its various sources of glucose (either the blood stream, fat deposits, as-yet undigested food, a post-workout Gatorade, whatever) and acts quickly to put that glucose back inside the body's cells.


It happens rapidly. Your body needs that energy immediately, not merely for the sake of exercise, but for the sake of getting around. What I mean is, let's assume you sprint as fast as you can for 200 meters. If you have given it a good effort, the muscles in your legs have expended so much of their stored energy that if that energy isn't replaced, you won't be able to walk. Indeed, track and field spectators have seen  many a 200-meter athlete collapse at the finish line, unable to continue to walk, much less run.

This is due to the fact that the body doesn't distinguish between "anaerobic energy used for sprinting" and "anaerobic energy used for walking." It's all the same stuff, and once it's gone, it's gone.

Now, here's what you need to know as a diabetic: When you engage in anaerobic exercise, your body will immediately act to replenish the energy you've used up. If the body does this too quickly or if you have used up too much of your stored energy, this will induce hypoglycemia.

After the Workout: Aerobic Exercise
When we engage in aerobic exercise, things follow a different path.

Recall that we learned in Part II that during cardiovascular exercise, we use up a little anaerobic energy to get started, and then the body phases-in aerobically generated energy to keep you going throughout your workout. This is what causes the heavy breathing, the elevated heartrate, and so forth. Your body is rapidly taking in oxygen to mix with sugar and insulin, and delivering it to your cells.

Once the workout is over, our bodies continue to have an elevated heartrate, we continue to breathe heavily, and our respiratory system continues to deliver aerobic energy into our cells. The process doesn't immediately end, it takes a little time to wind down, gradually.

Not only that, but aerobic respiration itself isn't a perfectly efficient process. You may have heard that your body "doesn't start to burn fat until twenty minutes into your workout." Twenty minutes is a ballpark figure, and in reality, the process is gradual rather than binary. But the bottom line is more or less true: It takes time for the body to be able to use the energy produced during aerobic respiration; it also takes time for the process to taper off.

This, too, functions as much logically as it does physiologically. What you might expect to occur within the body really does occur: Namely, our blood sugar remains elevated for some time after the workout, thanks to the gradual and inefficient nature of aerobic respiration. Eventually, though, it does taper off, and the energy must be replaced. The body once again gets "hungry" for more energy, and starts to transport any and all sugar from available sources into the cells so that it can be stored for future use.

Exactly how long this aerobic cycle lasts depends not only on your own unique body, but also on how fit you are, how hard you pushed yourself, and for how long you were exercising aerobically. It will not occur exactly the same way twice. In some cases, it will persist for twelve hours. Some endocrinologists have suggested to me that periods of longer than twenty-four hours are not uncommon.

Regardless, what's important for the diabetic to understand is this: Aerobic exercise will initially raise your blood sugar, and that rise in blood glucose will persist for quite some time after exercise. Eventually, however, the elevated blood sugar will subside as your body acts to replenish its stored energy - and this may induce hypoglycemia.

Some Closing Remarks/Discussion
I suppose the most vitally important thing to remember in all of this is that both anaerobic and aerobic exercise can induce hypoglycemia in a diabetic, for reasons I will (hopefully) elucidate in my next article. Therefore, always remain vigilant. Monitor yourself very carefully during and after exercise to ensure you are safe. It takes some experimentation to find out what your limits are and when you hit them.

I have to reiterate that because at every point in time, it is a diabetic's first priority to avoid life-threatening hypoglycemia. It is not the keystone of exercising as a diabetic, but it never goes away. We diabetics must simply and at all times think about hypoglycemia and how to avoid it. It is a fact of life for us.

So, the best recommendation I can give here is to always carry a little sugar with you when exercising, and always have a snack after the workout. No more than 15g of carbohydrates, and if I were you, I would not take it in the form of sugar. 

Having looked after that top priority, we can then dive into the details and nuances of the remaining information. We can then start analyzing how our bodies will react to various workouts to which we might subject it.

For example, an interval workout at the track will result in a particular "blood sugar reaction" afterward; a fifteen-mile long run will result in a different, no less unique reaction. And not only is the workout important, the sequence is, too. Lifting weights and then doing some cardio will do something different to your body than doing cardio and then lifting some weights.

In subsequent articles in this series, I will explore some of the considerations involved in the types of workouts you might choose, and the types of reactions we can expect from them.

This Week In Exercise

I could have titled this post "Week 7," but I chose not to for two reasons. First, I am not really covering any particular workout regimen at this point. Rather, I am chronicling my weekly workout experience and providing a look ahead at what sorts of exercizes I'll be doing in the coming week. That brings me to the other reason, which is that it doesn't make any sense to keep iterative track of the index of weeks involved, since the starting point was more or less arbitrary, and there is not endpoint in sight.

So, in the interest of clarity and sensibility, future posts of this kind will simply be entitled "This Week In Exercise."

Now For This Week In Particular
I was out visiting a client on Thursday and Friday, so I did not have access to my regular gym. Originally, the plan was to return to my physical trainer on Friday, but it would have been a long and pointless drive, not worth it in the long run. To make matters even more final, I had a rehearsal with a new band on Friday. I was under too much of a time-crunch to get my session in.

What I opted for instead, was to take Thursday as a rest day, get a light cardio workout in on Friday, go running on Saturday, and then on Sunday I returned to my trainer-recommended strength workout, which I detailed last week.

The amazing thing here is that the first time I did this workout, it nearly killed me. No, not really, obviously I am exaggerating. But the fact remains, it took everything I had to finish that workout, and I even had to take an unplanned break.

But by Sunday, the workout was almost easy. It was still a decent workout, but my body has already adapted to it. I can burn through the workout in about a half an hour, leaving plenty of additional time for cardio. It leaves me out-of-breath, but it doesn't leave me exhausted.

If this is what I have to look forward to during the time I have invested in physical training, then I am going to be in very good shape, indeed.

This week, I will get a new set of workouts, hopefully on Tuesday. In the meantime, my intention is to focus a bit more on running. The heat has been a real challenge, and I am having a difficult time getting any really good mileage in. It may also be true that the strength training is impeding the running a little bit - which happens every time I focus more on muscles and less on running. But it's far from impossible to maintain both a robust running regimen and a robust physical training regimen.  This week, I'd like to keep myself focused on getting some good mileage in, whatever "good" passes for in the burning heat out there.

OFF TOPIC:
I apologize for being a bit sparse with the posting over the last week or so. I had a busy week on the job, and multiple converging extracurricular commitments to look after. Things should improve henceforth.